Mzwai Piliso

Mzwandile "Mzwai" Piliso (died 25 June 1996) was a South African politician and former anti-apartheid activist. He was a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress (ANC) from 1962 to 1985 while the organisation was banned in South Africa and operated in exile. He is best known for his tenure as head of the National Intelligence and Security Department (NAT) of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the ANC's armed wing, and briefly represented the ANC in the post-apartheid National Assembly after the 1994 elections.

A pharmacist by profession, Piliso joined the ANC's external mission in 1960 and represented it abroad in Cairo and Dar es Salaam for the next decade. From 1976 to 1980, he was MK's regional commander in Angola and head of personnel and training. ANC president Oliver Tambo appointed him as director of NAT in 1981. His tenure at NAT over the next five years coincided with serious abuses by the department's internal security wing, known as Mbokodo, which tortured and even executed suspected spies and brutally suppressed a mutiny by MK recruits. Piliso's role in these abuses made him a controversial figure: although there was no question that Piliso had sanctioned and participated in some abuses, including the torture of at least one MK member, there remains debate about the extent to which he bears personal and principal responsibility for Mbokodo's conduct.

Early life and career Piliso was born in 1922 or 1923 to a Xhosa family in the Transkei in the former Cape Province. He had relatives who were senior members of the African National Congress (ANC), among them Joyce Piliso-Seroke, and joined the organisation in the late 1940s. In early 1969, he was appointed as a member of the seven-man disciplinary tribunal appointed for the sentencing of Chris Hani and the other signatories of the Hani memorandum, an open letter that was highly critical of MK's leadership; Hani later told historian Vladimir Shubin that Piliso had intervened to advocate for a less severe punishment. Piliso was re-elected to the NEC later in 1969 at the ANC's Morogoro Conference, and was also appointed to the NEC's new Revolutionary Council, established to coordinate the anti-apartheid struggle inside South Africa. and he later presided over NAT's repressive response to the Mkatashinga mutiny of 1983.

Those incidents led to an internal commission of inquiry and a decision to overhaul NAT, discussed at the ANC's next conference in Kabwe, Zambia in mid-1985. In South Africa's first post-apartheid elections in 1994, Piliso was elected to represent the ANC in the National Assembly, the lower house of the new South African Parliament. However, he resigned soon into his term and was appointed as an adviser in the office of Raymond Mhlaba, the inaugural Premier of the Eastern Cape. and in general the report "fairly clearly attached a degree of personal responsibility" to him, He received substantial media attention as a result, with the Weekly Mail 's front page declaring him the "ANC's torture chief". The commission specifically asked the ANC how it "justifies the fact that Mzwai Piliso and [MK commissar] Andrew Masondo retained senior posts in the post-1994 administration". – and more broadly was, with Masondo, "widely... held responsible for letting conditions in Angolan camps get out of control". ANC historians Stephen Ellis and Paul Trewhela, both noted critics of the exiled MK leadership, both questioned this assumption, suggesting that abuses were widespread and both preceded and outlasted Piliso's tenure at NAT;